


graveyard

by luxxurycar



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:14:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24058060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxxurycar/pseuds/luxxurycar
Summary: Esme dropped everything to follow him.
Relationships: Count Olaf/Esmé Squalor
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	graveyard

_“What have you done?”_ He snarls, pushing her aside without waiting for an answer. She pales, takes a step back that he doesn’t notice due to his focus being on the empty cells downstairs. By the time he stands again, his face still contorted in ugly rage, she has calmed herself. _He will not lay a hand on me,_ she reminds herself. If she’d had any doubt about that, she would have hesitated longer before allowing the prisoners to escape. “You will come downstairs with me and you _will_ help me kill Snicket,” he snarls, putting a finger in her face. She gazes at him coolly and nods.

He does not frighten her, not even like this, though she had not imagined that his anger would ever be directed so obviously and aggressively at her. He will not hit her and she knows that, but if it takes her a few seconds to properly compose herself before she follows him down the stairs, stomping as if she too is enraged by the prisoners’ escape, he does not notice. She had understood the potential consequences as she unlocked the cells, had weighed them in her mind before making the decision.

Olaf has always been relatively easy to please. All men are, when you’re Esme Gigi Genivieve Squalor. She’s not exactly worried about getting back into his good graces, especially when just moments ago he’d been so keen to _dance_. Besides, he’s already offered her an olive branch of sorts; Esme knows he’d meant it when he’d told her they were about to kill Snicket.

The murder goes well, for a murder. She’s never killed anyone before, but it isn’t as frightening as she’d thought it might be. In fact, it calms her. She had never disliked Jacques Snicket-nobody _disliked_ the Snickets; even Olaf had been friends with them, once-but his life is just a necessary sacrifice. She doesn’t _need_ Olaf, technically, to get the sugar bowl back; in fact, it would probably be easier to strike out on her own and get it, but _need_ and _want_ are two different things, and Esme _wants_ him, almost as badly as she wants the sugar bowl.

She knows these are dangerous things to want. She isn’t stupid-far from it, the degrees on the walls of her office prove that definitively-and she knows what Olaf does to women who wrong him. The stories of what he’s done to previous girlfriends are brought out regularly when he’s had too much to drink; she could practically tell them herself at this point, as if she’d been there to watch as he shoved so-and-so from a bridge. He likes to bring out the story about Beatrice, too, as if to test her, remind her that he _remembers_ who her family is, that he _knows_ she’s barely a step above the orphans, really. Olaf is certainly dangerous, yes, but she is dangerous too. It’s the reason he won’t lay a hand on her and she knows this, _knows_ it like it’s her own questionable moral compass.

Olaf is standing above Jacques’ still form, breathing heavily from the exertion of swinging the crowbar. There is blood, of course; Esme steps delicately around it and crowds into Olaf’s personal space, forcing him to look at her. The rage is gone from his face, and she smooths a hand along his jaw. Everything will be fine now, of course. Snicket is dead and she’s helped kill him. The reality of it still doesn’t bother her; it seems hardly important in the face of winning him back. Still, she is aware that it’s accomplished something else, too: she has the ability, the will, to kill someone. He is dangerous, but she is lethal too.

~

She hates the hospital the moment she lays eyes on it. It’s an ugly building, even uglier when they get inside. She tries not to let it bother her when Olaf takes the doctor disguise. _Nurses kill people too,_ she reminds herself, and she has little doubt that she will want to, when the time comes.

She is furious, a full display of just how _dangerous_ she can be. It’s a reminder, really. For all of them. She’d never considered carving up a girl before, not even to make a point; she doesn’t know if it’s _in_. But she knows she’ll do it. If they don’t capture the orphans, if they don’t secure the _sugar bowl_ … She doesn’t let herself think like that. Of course it will happen. The stars will align for them, because the fortune is Olaf’s right just as the sugar bowl is hers. She keeps her focus centered there, on that one simple fact. _It’s mine,_ she reminds herself so often that she catches herself repeating it aloud to empty hospital rooms.

Under the fury, she is jumpy, skittish. She thinks it is probably due to the caffeine, which she never drank as a financial adviser because it shakes her focus. She is not scared of Olaf, though her thoughts wander, as she watches him prepare to kill the girl. She wonders if he truly wants to do this, if he imagines Beatrice beneath his scalpel. She wonders for a split second, shaking from adrenaline as they pile into the getaway car in an undignified scramble, fire alarms blaring from the ugly building behind them, if this is worth it. _Of course it is,_ she reminds herself quickly as Olaf gets behind the wheel. _It’s_ **_mine_**.

~

 _It’s mine,_ she repeats silently all the way to Caligari Carnival. It has to be; she _deserves_ this. If she is going to lose him too, after all this time-and she _is_ losing him, she can tell-then she _deserves_ the sugar bowl as compensation. She doesn’t know if her paranoia is due to leftover caffeine or if they’re truly falling apart until they meet the fortune teller. Olaf’s face softens, making him look younger, handsomer. He looks at Lulu like he used to look at her. Esme hadn’t fully realized he’d stopped looking at her like that.

She wants to rip something to shreds; settles for cutting up an old tent and making a new dress. The freaks are good, distracting. The captured lions captivate her; they want just as fiercely as she does. She _wants_ so much, these days, even as she tries to make herself smaller. She wants Olaf to be the man she dropped everything for and ran away with again; wants to be the girl who’d done that only a few months ago, wants to be as fierce and fearless as one of the lions she taunts with her whip. She wants to go back to the city almost as badly as she wants to punch Lulu. The sugar bowl seems insignificant here, surrounded by nothing but open land for miles. _Everything_ seems insignificant here, except her rage and her wanting, as if both have expanded under the open sky.

 _It’s mine,_ she repeats to herself through the late nights with the troupe, Olaf telling stories to Lulu the way he’d told them to her, once. _But is it?_ She wonders, because if she can lose him so completely, then she can surely lose the sugar bowl too, regardless of how perfectly it matches the rest of the set at home.

 _Home_. She doesn’t think the penthouse is her home anymore; if she were Jerome, she would have sold it, disappeared, left her for what she’s done. She wonders if the rest of the set even exists anymore and begins to understand the weight of what she’s given up for this.

Olaf notices. She has not tried terribly hard to hide her scattered thoughts, her jealousy regarding Lulu. Maybe that’s why, when she turns from the lion pit-their wanting, at least, satisfied for now-she meets his gaze and sees, for a split second before he looks away, that the fortune teller wasn’t his first choice of prey. She doesn't know how to feel about this, or whether she should feel anything at all. _He will not lay a hand on me, after all this time,_ she thinks, and that, perhaps, is why she gets back into the getaway car with him as the tents go up in flames.

~

She has always known, possibly even before she revised her morals and her priorities at the first mention of the sugar bowl, that everything would go up in flames eventually. There is no other way, with Olaf; he knows no other method of ending things. She had known this and accepted it as she took his hand and let him help her into the getaway car again and again and again, yet somehow she had never pictured this. The Denouement is certainly a lost cause. Esme is starting to feel like she can relate.

Through the mountains and the sea and the seemingly never ending car rides-she’s not sure she ever wants to get in a car again-Esme had held tight to that one constant. _Olaf will not lay a hand on me,_ she repeated silently through long nights and his longer monologues. Sometimes she’d wished that he would. _Touch me,_ she’d wanted to demand sometimes, but she’d kept her mouth closed. She has _acted_ , in every sense of the word; played the role long after the shine had come off of the adventure and their relationship, and she has won. Well. Not _won_ ; she does not, will not, have the sugar bowl. But she has _survived_. She is greater than the other women who have wronged him, greater than her sister at last.

It is a hollow victory. She has lost everything: the penthouse, the sugar bowl, Jerome, Olaf...she is probably not even the city’s sixth most important financial adviser anymore. She is probably not the _most important_ anything. She lets out a little hiccup of a sob, the closest she lets herself get to crying, these days, and finds it echoed. The grip on her hand is so slight she’d let herself forget about the very frightened and slightly singed little girl standing beside her. Carmelita.

Esme hadn’t particularly liked her, through everything-though, in fairness, she hadn’t particularly liked _anything_. Carmelita had merely been _useful_. She does not seem particularly useful now, her face and hair covered in ash, her eyes wide and frightened as she gazes as the once-impressive hotel now up in flames. Esme can relate. “Come,” she says, tugging lightly on the girl’s arm to prompt her to start moving. This is who she has now. They will find a way to survive. She’s always thought it might be fun to change her name, dye her hair, and perhaps it will be. But it doesn’t have to be. They have _survived_ , and that is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> title is a reference to Graveyard by Halsey. also I am gayziiraphale on tumblr if anyone wants to follow!


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